EA - Young EAs should choose projects more carefully by sabrinac

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Young EAs should choose projects more carefully, published by sabrinac on September 2, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Thanks to Emma Williamson for her helpful feedback. Epistemic status: I wrote this up pretty quickly so take what I say with a grain of salt. A lot of this post is based on an intuition I’ve developed after talking to lots of young EAs. I also think this post is most relevant for people working within community-building and meta-EA stuff. I wish someone would’ve given me this advice a year ago, so I hope it’s useful for other people. The problem Lots of young EAs are uncertain about their career paths and enjoy working within the EA community, so they often default to working on hopping between independent projects that have the EA stamp of approval. (e.g. doing ops for Atlas, independent community-building projects, going to the Bay to learn about AI safety, running one-off retreats, etc.) While hopping between independent projects can allow you to quickly test your fit for something, I think many young EAs should do this less and/or think more carefully about which projects they’re working on. There are a bunch of reasons why I think this: Independent, unrelated projects often lack good mentorship and learning structures. You don’t get to work at an established org where you get lots of feedback from your boss/mentor. You also usually don’t build up expertise in a field. It encourages young people to stay within the EA bubble, instead of leaving, acquiring diverse skill-sets, and getting feedback from the real world. This also exacerbates talent bottlenecks further down the funnel once the community lacks expertise in specific fields/career paths. Young people often equate “working on an EA project” with “doing work that substantially improves the world/reduces x-risk.” While projects might seem valuable in the short term, I think it damages young people’s longer-term impact. (i.e. by delaying you from developing deep expertise and career capital.) Instead of grappling with the complexity of the problems you want to solve, hopping between projects gives you a shallow understanding of several different things. I think my claim mostly applies to a certain subset of young people in EA, particularly community-builders and people with a lack of direction/concrete career plans. There’s another related trend where I see community-builders incentivized to put out fires and solve the small-scale problems immediately in front of them. They get the reputation as someone who can “get shit done” but in practice, they’re usually solving ops bottlenecks at the cost of building harder-to-acquire skills. I’m concerned that conscientious young women with high executive functioning disproportionately get trapped here. Caveats This post doesn’t apply to the majority of young EAs. Some independent projects are useful for figuring out if you enjoy specific kinds of work, allowing you to quickly eliminate career options. I’m not arguing that young people should spend less time working on projects, but rather that they should choose projects more carefully, prioritizing ones with (a) good mentorship/learning opportunities and (b) a narrow focus within the fields they’re interested in. I don’t think this trend is indicative across the entire community. I think when people want to work within a specific cause area—e.g. AI safety, biosecurity, animal welfare, etc.—they have a lot more direction and this phenomenon happens less. This problem overlaps with community-builders spending too much time community-building, and not engaging enough with the problems they want to solve. Suggestions Don’t work on a project just because it has the EA stamp of approval—make sure you have a clear theory of change for why you’re working on something. (Gently and kindly) tell your frie...